Seize the Day

by Mike Read

  The school had an excellent sporting and educational strike rate as well as fiercely contested inter-house competitions. I was in Drake House, as I had been in my previous school, and continued to volunteer for everything ‘for the good of the House’. Football, cricket, tennis, boxing, cross-country, chess, basketball … I was there. I’ve been dogged by cross-country dreams all my life, but heaven knows why, always a different course, but always much faster than in real life. I revisited the old buildings some years ago and was regaled with tales of ghostly happenings and extraordinary temperature changes. I can believe that.

  Several Old Wokingians became eminent musicians, including the leader of school group The Hustlers, Mick Green, who went on to enormous success with Foreigner. He was my guest on Saturday Superstore one week, and just before we went live, I whispered, ‘Rigby Hardaker sends his love.’ Mick’s face was a picture. Our deputy headmaster and head of Latin, while resembling a miniature Mekon from Dan Dare, wallowed in the delightfully Dickensian name of Rigby Hardaker.

  As in sport, humility was also the name of the game in academia. I only discovered years later, on buying some books I wanted, that they’d been written, as had many others, by our history master L. C. B. (Godfrey) Seaman. Our biology master and leader of the school treks, Kenneth Fudge, had the appearance of a being from a much earlier period and would amuse us by watching a piece of chalk like a hawk, to see if it moved. We watched too, thinking that it just might. It never did. I have even chatted with him on Facebook once or twice over the last year or two, but didn’t dare mention the chalk. Still the schoolboy at heart. Anyway, the love affair with music was definitely on … and it looked like lasting.

  Sensing my exuberance and desperation to be involved somehow, my grandfather bought me a guitar. It was a small acoustic, not a flashy electric like the real stars played, but it was a start and my attempts to convert it into something more spectacular by drawing on it failed dismally. I morphed into a piece of human blotting paper, absorbing anything I could and avidly learning rudimentary chords from anyone who could be bothered to show me. Unlike other kids with guitars, I had no desire to be a lead guitarist, as long as I was able to play enough chords to write songs. Then there was the all-important aspect of forming a group. Forget the standard of musicianship, if you had an instrument you were in. If someone you knew had a van, they were the manager. Business acumen? Forget it, a van was the way forward. Of course within a short space of time, the stragglers lost ground and were ejected either pleasantly or unpleasantly, as the group took one step nearer to becoming the next Beatles or Stones. Most of the time was spent thinking about a name. Getting the right name was surely the first step to success. At odd times I and whoever was around would play as the Layabouts, the Rivals and, for one gig, the Riverbeats.

  My earliest song was an instrumental which my mother dubbed ‘Sheer Hell’. What was it like? There’s a clue in her title. More melodic attempts followed, with such classic lines as ‘All the lights on the hills break my heart, all the stars in the sky play a part’. I can’t honestly say what part the stars played and to be perfectly frank I’d never had my heart broken, but it seemed the right road to travel. Another early lyric was the deeply profound, or was it tediously basic, ‘It’s me and, you know, it will always be’. At least it threw up a degree of self-awareness. The title of another song was ‘Ever Decreasing Circles’, which just possibly summed up its direction.

  Our earliest attempts at being a group were rough hewn but filled with schoolboy enthusiasm. We were rehearsing upstairs one day when the buzzer on our dumb waiter started going berserk. It was my mother. I stuck my head down the lift-shaft only to receive orders to present myself downstairs. I was used to receiving orders. I became a dab hand at giving the dumb waiter just the right amount of tug to let it free fall and knowing just when to grab it, inches before a crockery disaster. I climbed over and crawled into most places as a kid, including roofs and cellars, but the dumb waiter would have been madness and I was probably too big. We had an elaborate bell system as well, which meant I could be summoned from anywhere in the house. My mother did a lot of summoning. I assumed, on this occasion, that the bass was throbbing through floors, walls and ceilings as it was wont to do. Preparing my usual answer, ‘It doesn’t sound as good if we play quietly’, I was surprised to see that she was with two men and introduced one of them as Mr Gomelsky. He was bearded, his colleague clean shaven. They’d heard the music from the open windows and were looking for somewhere to start a club for groups to play in. Did I know of anywhere? I knew nothing of buildings, property or suitable spaces, so probably looked rather vacant. Anyway I was keen to get back to rehearsals and left my mother chatting to them over a drink. I should have stayed a little longer. A year or two later and I’d have been more inquisitive: ‘Music club, eh? Do you need a group? Maybe we should keep in touch.’

  ‘Who were they?’ I asked later.

  It transpired that the sidekick was called Hamish and the other was a Giorgio Gomelsky. The mater said that he seemed to be the one in charge. Of course I knew the name. Giorgio was the former manager of the Rolling Stones and was then looking after the Yardbirds. He was heavily involved in the Richmond music scene and had helped put together the early R&B festivals at Richmond that would morph into the Windsor and then the Reading Festival. Missed out there.

  One local group were head and shoulders above the rest and that was the Echolettes, who were resident at the youth club, but in reality far, far better than that. Slightly older than us, they featured Rod Roach on lead guitar, who by rights should have been up there with the greats. Rod’s technique, style and execution were so ahead of the times that one wasn’t sure whether to be inspired or give up. The Echolettes made it to TV’s Ready, Steady, Win, an offshoot competition from Ready, Steady, Go!, and featured on the ensuing LP and later CD with their song ‘Our Love Feels New’. A later line-up, still featuring Rod, recording in De Lane Lea Studios, encouraged me to turn up at the session with one or two of my songs, as Dave Siddle, the engineer/producer, might well like them. They followed me on ‘Thoughts of You’, but we hadn’t rehearsed it and it didn’t come over as I’d heard it in my head and I wasn’t confident enough to relax and take my time over it.

  ‘It’d make a great B-side,’ said Siddle, whose work would eventually encompass musicians from Deep Purple and Jimi Hendrix to Herman’s Hermits and the Goons. I was thrilled. At around the same time I played some songs to Screen Gems and received a similar response. I reasoned that it was a start. Surely it was but a short step from writing B-sides to writing A-sides. When older and wiser, I learned that this was a time-honoured way of someone saying they weren’t keen on a song. A critic might say that my first real songs revealed a very diverse approach or, if one were a little harsher, that I was thrashing around looking for a direction.

  Another up-and-coming Walton/Weybridge outfit was Unit 39, fronted by our local doctor’s son, David Ballantyne, who majored on soul and blues and was bloody good at it for a white boy in his mid-teens. Within months he signed a deal with EMI, who released a few singles, including ‘I Can’t Express It’ and ‘Love around the World’, the latter becoming a huge pirate radio hit. We’d later team up before he went on to play with Geno Washington and wind up as a classical DJ in the States. Another one who should have made it. He looked great and had a stunning soul voice. His sister Celia later became Julian Lloyd Webber’s first wife.

  At college, I ran the music club, such as it was, wrote a comic opera called City Sounds that leaned heavily on John Gay and Charles Dickens, and was art editor of the rag mag. I also wrote songs about Dickens (‘What the Dickens’ emerging on a 2013 compilation), a friend’s psychedelic roadshow and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, and attempted to emulate Bob Dylan’s ‘stream of consciousness’ songs. Bob had certainly drawled something very similar long before me … and had executed it with more commitment. Even so, I like to think that lines such as ‘getting caught in
the spider’s web of uniformity’ have a certain ring even today, even if I didn’t know what I was talking about. Many of the songs I put down in that period have disappeared, but just as many remain as a musical diary including ‘Nicola’, ‘Charley Brewster’s DJ Show’, ‘Pictures on my Wall’ and ‘If She’s a Day’, all appearing on a ’90s album for which I actually got good reviews for my singing. Viva retrospection I say. I shamelessly quote: ‘Well-crafted ballads with Read’s folksy delivery reminiscent at times of Donovan, Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan.’ The reviewer also noted that the eclectic mix included ‘Edward E. James Rainbow’, ‘an infectious upbeat homage to poet Edward James, the godson of Edward VII, whose sizeable inheritance enabled him to become a patron of the arts’. Despite the diversity of subjects, another reviewer, who’d clearly led a sheltered life, wrote, ‘For what are essentially bedroom recordings, Mike Read’s early work is surprisingly strong.’ Where was that reviewer at the time?

  The Welsh Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was also a big influence on my writing, or at least I like to think he was. It was more the internal rhyming and sprung rhythm that inspired me rather than the copious dollops of alliteration or the darker side of his subject matter.

  It was while having tea at the house of a great-aunt and -uncle that I scribbled down the germ of an idea that was to become my first published song, ‘Evening Paper’. I know it sounds like a cliché but it was genuinely written on an envelope. When writers come out with this old chestnut in interviews, they tend to be pooh-poohed by the sceptic that’s questioning them. I’m no pooh-pooher. I believe them, because I wrote on that envelope.

  With the song complete, and not wishing to do things by halves, I strode purposefully along Savile Row, knocked at the door of No. 17 and marched boldly in. This was the home of one of the biggest transatlantic publishers, Carlin Music. After the striding, knocking and marching came the wavering. These guys published song for Elvis, Cliff and hundreds of stars. Maybe this new song and a couple of others I’d recorded for good measure weren’t that good. But amazingly I was ushered upstairs to the office of Dave Most, the brother of record producer Mickie Most. Before listening to my songs, he played me a couple of new releases, due out the following month. This was it. I was part of the inner circle. Hearing tracks before they hit the shops or even the airwaves! Maybe more out of encouragement than conviction, Dave listened to my songs and muttered something that sounded like ‘suitable for Herman’s Hermits’ – or maybe it was ‘not suitable for Herman’s Hermits’. It was now surely a short step to writing for Cream or John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Then surely the American market would open up. I was convinced I could knock up something pretty reasonable for the Byrds, or maybe the Lovin’ Spoonful. I got a contract, but in the eyes of contractual law, I rather embarrassingly still needed my father to sign for the dream to become a reality, as I was under age, which turned out to be a lot harder than actually getting the publishing deal. He made me wait for a whole week before he consented, imagining that I might be signing away any meagre goods or chattels that I possessed. I never heard another word about ‘Evening Paper’, the song that may or may not have been suitable for Herman. The cutting-edge lyric involved a guy who bizarrely places a newspaper small ad offering ‘happiness for hire’. In retrospect, a rather arrogant action, but not an earth-shattering song.

  One summer holiday, I was on the receiving end of a phone call from a friend, imploring me to jump on a train immediately and only alight when I saw the sign Bognor Regis. Always up for an adventure and not getting too many straight answers to my questions, I submitted to his entreaty. OK, it wasn’t exactly a blues-guitar-playing hobo riding a freight train to Milwaukee, but it was the way we English folk did it. ‘Single to Bognor, if I may? Thank you so much.’ The Shoreline Club and its sister establishment within the same building, the Caribbean Hotel, was a world first – a hotel run by teenagers for teenagers. What could possibly go right? Musically, everything. The story of the birth, life and death of the club lurks in my revealing tome The South Coast Beat Scene of the 1960s, but here let’s just note a handful of the acts that performed there and opened up even more musical avenues (and a few cul-de-sacs): David Bowie, Bluesology (with Long John Baldry and Elton John on keyboards), the Equals, Geno Washington, Jimmy James, the Artwoods, Pink Floyd, Arthur Alexander, the Who, John Mayall, Arthur Brown, the Herd … the list is by no means endless, but you get the vibe, I’m sure. The place had a cast of characters that you couldn’t have invented, with the all-nighters full of mods popping pills not for kicks but simply to keep awake. It was a different and more decent era, but I’m sure the older guys with a little more savoir faire took advantage of the situation in any way they could. Down the years I have remained friendly with some of the folk that I met all those years ago, especially Percy Nowell, Hugh Wilson and Blair Montague-Drake. We still talk with enthusiasm and love for those distant days, keep the characters alive in our conversation, both the good and the bad, extol the virtues of the camaraderie if not the food, and I rather suspect would love to take a time machine back to those heady days when the world was at our feet. The Shoreline was a unique place, where you could chat, hang out or even play a bit of guitar with some seriously interesting guys. The media, of course, had a field day, assuming it was a den of iniquity. It wasn’t, at least not for me, but I was pretty naive. I had several letters from both my mother and my maternal grandmother insisting that I leave the place at once. They must have been kidding. I was discovering new music, new people, a new way of life, playing guitar each night and going to the beach every day. I could handle that.

  The man behind the Shoreline and the Caribbean Hotel was the incredible and inspirational Eric St John Foti, a man who has truly lived life to the full and whose middle names should have been carpe diem. He is still in full flow well into his eighties, with projects, flying lessons and an inexhaustible supply of ideas and energy. He offered me a few pounds a week, which for holiday money was fine, as all the food (such as it was) was free, as were the music, the incredible camaraderie and the experience. I’d have paid him for all that. Circa 2004 my pal Eddie Grant, who played at the Shoreline with his group the Equals was so delighted to know that Eric was alive and well and living in Norfolk that he insisted we caught a train up there to see him. A great reunion. Eric was and still is a driving force that brought people together and got things done. I still go to Eric’s various anniverseries, which seem unlikely to end.

  Every teenager working at the place had to participate in the menial and day-to-day jobs necessary to keep the place going, but at night I was put on stage with my twelve-string guitar to play between the groups. In principle it sounds like a hot ticket. In reality the floor emptied when the heaving, sweating crowd rushed to get a drink, the sound of the Who, the Action or the Untamed still ringing in their ears, as I tottered on in my Cuban-heel boots and corduroy jacket to play a handful of Donovan- and Dylan-style songs to the few remaining souls who simply weren’t in a fit state to make it as far as the Coke bar. My job, it seemed, was to leave again as soon as the crowd returned for the second half. The manager of the Untamed, Ken Chaplin, promised me an audition with top record producer Shel Talmy, who’d worked his magic on the Who and the Kinks as well as Chaplin’s band, but despite sitting in the reception of Regent Sound in Denmark Street in my painted jeans and clutching my twelve-string Hoyer for the whole of an afternoon, the legend never emerged from the studio and I eventually went home. There was talk of joining the Untamed, but A-levels rather obviously won out. I was also pushed in the direction of another manager who was making a name for himself, Ken Pitt. I remember playing for him in his office in Curzon Street, but despite making promising noises, nothing came of it. Looking back, I should have pushed a little more, been more assertive and projected some attitude, but I was probably too polite.

  The Shoreline was an education. It was where I grew up musically. Until then I’d bought fairly mainstream pop records. I loved them
then and still do, but at Bognor I discovered other music that hadn’t been on the radar. One of my jobs was to buy new records for the club, which meant heading off to the local record shop, Tansley and Cooke, once a week with a fistful of dollars to spend. The music world opened up. I bought tracks on Sue, Tamla Motown, Bluebeat, Stax and many other labels, returning with the likes of Billy Preston, Don Covay, Prince Buster, Otis Redding, the Temptations, Justin Hines and the Skatalites. The club scene was so different to the radio. I even went out on a limb and bought Frank Zappa’s early Mothers of Invention single ‘It Can’t Happen Here’. It was weird, you couldn’t dance to it and the milkman would have had a hell of a job whistling it, but it broadened my horizons.

  I wrote a few songs at the Shoreline, including the Beach-Boy-esque ‘Shoreline Surfin’’ and the pop-orientated ‘Find Her’, in collaboration with Dave Hooper, much-respected singer with top south coast outfit Dave and the Diamonds. I was also challenged to write a song by a couple of holidaying Cadet Corps lads from Lancashire about Colne, their home town. I haven’t played it since, but I can still remember sizeable chunks of it:

  Latchkeys are fumbling | In the distance rumbling

  Sounds of the rail | Aurora to the West

  Silhouettes against the night sky

  Seems to infest | The assembled rubble nearby

  Separate echoes now of Colne.

  The TV show Whole Scene Going, came to the Shoreline to film at that time and I borrowed a blue polka-dot tab-collar shirt from one of the cadets to wear for my scene. They filmed me playing my twelve-string Hoyer and singing ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’. I desperately wanted to play one of my own songs, or at least something with a hint of credibility, but for them it was gentle guy plus twelve-string guitar equals folk song. Oh well.